Luciano Bianciardi
La vita agra

La vita agra by Luciano Bianciardi had already been present in my memory for a long time, although I do not know precisely since when or for what reason. I vaguely placed the novel in the post-World War II period, somewhere in central-northern Italy, within no specific political-cultural movement.

These days I rediscovered that it is a novel about the economic miracle that highlights, in advance as only a novel can do, the darker aspects of this Italian historical phenomenon.

It is a text in which the author, narrator, and protagonist are more or less, as far as possible, the same person. The plot is quite simple. From the beginning, the protagonist, an idealistic anarchist, finds himself in Milan. He has moved here from the Tuscan Maremma with the aim of avenging forty-three miners from his land, who died in an accident that occurred in a mine under obscure circumstances. Like De André's bomb-maker, there in Milan, he wants to hit the Torracchione, which is the modern headquarters of the company that owns the mine, with an attack.

Milan soon makes him forget the purpose of his trip.

Initially, he lives in the Braida del Guercio, a sort of village just outside the city center, where he lives with another emigrant in a small apartment that shares the landing with other apartments where other emigrants like them live. In the condominium and the Braida, he can thus experience dances, songs, and stories from various parts of Italy and Europe. In the library, he can learn the history of that place.

The meeting and falling in love, the relationship, and living together with Anna lead him into the city's turmoil. The relationship between the two is erratic and impetuous, vital but besieged: gradually, inexorably, the constant need for money and deadlines and collectors and urgencies relegates the copulatory enthusiasm of their early days to a nocturnal nook, the only moment when Milanese activism slows down.

Outside of the relationship with Anna, in Milan, there are no relationships like those that could be established in Maremma or the Braida. The other person is only of interest concerning the money they earn and the cash they can spend. Otherwise, they remain a stranger, regarded with closed hostility on trams or sidewalks.

You shudder observing the death of a drunk man:

It was a purgatory abyss, and I never precisely knew whether those shadows were men or women, real people, or ghosts. I remember a Saturday evening when I had argued with Anna over the usual stories, and I wandered among the thorns of the abyss with great sad malice and atrocious thoughts. Next to me passed a shadow, and I heard a sort of thin, insistent hiss, and then I decided to run home immediately to Anna and make peace immediately, but just at the beginning of the short alley, next to a gas station, there was a man lying on the ground, certainly a drunk, because on Saturday evenings you often heard the angry, disjointed singing of some drunkard left alone. The man on the ground had white hair and now looked at me with a silly smile. "How are you?" I asked him. "Want a hand?" He grumbled something in dialect, throatily, sat up, and extended his hand to me. I understood he meant help me stand up, and indeed I helped him. For a while, I even supported him under the armpits, but as soon as I let go, and he attempted to walk on his own legs, he staggered and fell backward. He was dead, still looking at me, but no longer with the silly smile, rather with glassy eyes, and when I bent down to see better, I noticed a trickle of blood coming from his nape and spreading black on the pavement. In the bar next to it, I had already seen four men without ties playing cards, so I went there to say there was a drunk injured, and that alone I couldn't manage to get him back on his feet, and indeed trying, he had fallen and hit his head. The four barely raised their eyes, saying nothing.

…

A couple came, sidestepped to avoid stepping on him, and went on. I stood there, motionless, and could do nothing: couldn't move the drunk, because he had hit his head, and I knew it could be very dangerous. Couldn't ask anyone for help, because everybody minded their own business. Just had to wait for the ambulance to arrive. After a while, I decided to go back home also to tell Anna, but she was still angry with me, sitting bent over at the small table pretending to read. I lay down on the bed without turning off the light, feeling how hostile Anna was behind the wardrobe, so I told her nothing. I stayed there, silent and tense, eyes open. Over an hour passed before the ambulance siren. The next day, on the tram, I searched the news and read exactly that a sixty-five-year-old unidentified drunk had died from a fracture of the cranial base, following a fall deemed accidental. Besides, it happened every day, my colleagues explained at the office.

A few dramatic pages emerge from a narrative that instead immerses the reader in the following grotesque assembly line: morning calls from clients, daily work (twenty pages need to be written each day), collectors, door-to-door and phone salesmen, the water heater to turn off every four hours, money to send back home, nocturnal love. Only to start again the next morning with more calls, another twenty pages, more collectors…

We are in 1962, and, in defense of his own humanity, the protagonist also dreams of a different world, an egalitarian and copulatory revolution, a regression to a primordial world, without new needs where everyone desires only what nature offers, dreams of an escape from the city together with Anna… Moments of nocturnal truce, before the siege of the Milanese economic miracle resumes, with its corporate strategy, its daily production, its payments, its taxes, its work calls, engulfing the protagonist in its infernal depths.

Closed the book, I wonder: I, a reader of 2024, together with you readers, what machinery do I live inside? When did I have the last truce? What is the state of health of my humanity?